Making an XML Sitemap for Google Webmaster Tools [Quick Tutorial]

A sitemap has two main purposes. Publically accessible sitemaps are sometimes put on websites so users can see the site's structure and easily find information. Search engines also use sitemaps—in this case, website owners can use them to tell Google and other search engines where to find the pages of their website.

So, essentially, a sitemap is a list of links with other information. The sitemap format that Google recommends is XML, so this tutorial will cover creating a basic XML sitemap and uploading it to Google Webmaster Tools for Google to use. This process is ideal for small sites with simple structures.

Create the Sitemap

Here is an example of a sitemap, and below, we will go through it in more detail. You can use this as the basis of your own sitemap.

The opening tag of the sitemap is <urlset> with a parameter showing that it is following Sitemap Protocol 0.9 from SiteMaps.org.

After this, you start listing your URLs using the <url> tag. A number of tags can be applied to each URL:

· <loc> – you will need this as it is the basis of your sitemap. It is the URL of the page, and must start with http://

· <lastmod> – the date you last modified the page, in the YYYY-MM-DD format.

· <changefreq> – with this tag you can tell Google how often the page changes. Google will still decide how often to crawl it, but this gives it a guide. The options you have are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never. Always is for a page that changes each time it is accessed (an example would be a social media timeline page). Never is for archived pages on your website.

· <priority> – this is another way you can tell Google how important you think the page is. It will make its own decision on crawl frequency, but the priority setting is taken into account. It can be a value between 0.0 and 1.0, with 1.0 being the highest.

You can use a text editor like Notepad to create your sitemap.

Save and Upload

Save your sitemap with the filename "sitemap.xml". You should then upload it to the root directory of your server. This will give your sitemap the URL: YourDomain.com/sitemap.xml.

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